Attorney Chris Lee on Doing It Right: Confidence & the Power of the Process
APRIL 15, 2026
He lost all his confidence in high school. Then Chris Lee discovered what happens when you fall in love with the process.
“The results created the confidence. No question about it.”
Chris Lee is the Managing Director and COO of Dickie, McCamey & Chilcote, a Pittsburgh law firm where he’s worked for over 30 years. He chairs the firm’s food and beverage industry group and has defended restaurant chains in some of the largest food safety outbreaks in U.S. history. But when Greg Weimer sat down with him for Living Your Legacy, it wasn’t the resume that made the conversation worth having. It was what came before it.
Chris was the youngest of seven kids in Bethel Park. Good student in grade school. Student council president. Then high school hit, and the confidence vanished. He spent years drifting, switching from accounting to political science at IUP, skipping class, not doing the homework. The turn came when he met his wife Christy, enrolled at Duquesne Law School, and decided to show up differently. He went to class every day. He studied until nine o’clock every night. He studied every Sunday. For the first time in his life, he fell in love with the process, and the results followed.
That discipline took him from law review editor to a clerkship at Dickie McCamey that became a three-decade career. When the Chi-Chi’s hepatitis A outbreak hit in 2003, affecting 1,000 people and making national news, he sat across from 600 families and resolved their cases one conversation at a time. Now he mentors the next generation of lawyers the same way his father Don Lee, a Navy veteran turned federal judge, mentored him: show up early, do the work, treat people with respect, and be home for dinner.
In this episode, gain insights on:
- Falling in love with the process: Chris spent years skipping class and coasting on potential. The turnaround happened in law school when he committed to showing up every day and studying every night. The results came after the discipline, not before it.
- Confidence built through results: Chris's confidence didn't come back through pep talks. It came from nailing a three-hour law school exam after months of sustained preparation. Results first, then confidence. He's clear about the order.
- Mentorship that happens in hallways: At Dickie McCamey, the real education happened at a lunch table in the PPG Place food court. Senior lawyers traded stories, talked through depositions, and coached junior attorneys face to face. Chris worries that remote work has gutted this kind of accidental mentorship.
- Doing the right thing in difficult moments: In the Chi-Chi's hepatitis A outbreak, 1,000 people were affected and some died. Chris's team sat down with 600 families, heard their stories, and resolved their cases one at a time. He didn't see a conflict between defending his client well and treating people with empathy.
- A support system you can build on: Chris names his wife Christy as the single most important factor in his career. She held things together through years of travel, late nights, and Monday-night departures to cases across the country. Balance, he says, sometimes means being out of balance for a while.
